Kursinformation

In this seminar, we are going to trace developments in the British perception of India from the very first encounters in the late sixteenth century to the end of British rule in India. We will come across a wide range of perspectives: from informal and formal colonialism fuelled by the desire for wealth and power to Indophiles immersing themselves in Indian culture. This seminar will give you an opportunity to study inter-cultural encounters and the texts, images (and even some music) created as a result of such contacts. This seminar will also give you an opportunity to get acquainted with people such as Thomas Coryate, who, from 1612, walked on foot from Istanbul to India, William Jones, who in the eighteenth century discovered that Indian and European languages were related, and Fanny Parkes, who described her experiences in early nineteenth-century India in a remarkable diary.

The seminar will probably be conducted entirely online and entirely in real time - it all depends on the conditions imposed by the pandemic which are not really predictable right now. In this case, we will meet via Zoom each week of the semester at the time of the seminar. You will receive further information concerning the Moodle room and the Zoom link for this course once you have registered. Please make sure to use and check your official university e-mail addresses at all times. Do not use any other addresses, and do not have e-mails sent to your university address forwarded to other addresses. Our experience in the last semester has shown that using non-university addresses / forwarding mails will lead to our messages bouncing back in very many cases.

The texts and images we are going to work on will be made available either online via Moodle or, if we can return to face to face teaching, in the shape of a paper reader. Once again, you will receive further information concerning this via e-mail. As always: think, enjoy (!), annotate, and look things up if necessary. Requirements: thorough preparation for each session, active participation, and, if applicable, written work/exam according to your particular Studienordnung.

Just in case your application is rejected by the LSF system: If you want to do this course because you are genuinely interested, you will be most welcome, no matter what LSF says. Please get in touch with claudia.hausmann@uni-due.de who will enrol you manually. The worst that might happen to you is that you cannot do a Leistungsnachweis if you lack the formal requirements.